Our Focus Right Now

A Very Belated, and Very Important Update!

3rd grade

This blog has been neglected. Busy, busy, busy. So much has gone on with the school since the last post. Summer camp was the best ever, and this school year has been the best ever as well.October attendance shows 152 students in regular attendance at the school!! The bad news is, only 39 of them

Kindergarten teacher at recess

are sponsored!! More good news is some partnerships we have been forming. Center for Research and Education in New York City did a teacher training in August, a restaurant in the area donates rice for school meals, Faith, Hope, and Joy Foundation and Love United complete the rest, pay the

Morning director with students

cook, and provide oversight. Praise God! 

So the biggest news is explained in the Facebook post below:

Camp zoo trip, July 2014

WARNING: A challenge and rant. Alright, I hope to convey to the many of you who have worked with the school in Padre Granero in some respect and who love the kids and teachers there, the urgency that I feel. On Jan. 24th 2015, we have to move out of the current space that has the playground pictured in this group's photo.

"My School" drawing contest

n the area and this is the one! This is why I set up the Recycle for Padre Granero group and kids have been chipping in fundraising through recycling, and now through a "My School" t-shirt design contest which will be on t-shirts sent to anyone who donates $100+ for the new building. Anyway, I

"Little store" rewards

think we have to have the serious, collective, committed goal of purchasing this place by the time camp 2015 starts...which is the last week in June. I know we can do it!! I want to do some monthly fundraiser challenges that people can do in their respective cities. I know we

School meals

are all scattered all over the place which makes things harder, but I urge you to please be bold and confident! We can do it and the cause is oh so worthy! When we first came here in 2006 and conducted a street census, we easily created 140 profiles for kids working on the streets, the majority of whom were Haitians living in Padre Granero, NONE of whom (among the Haitians) were in school. And there were plenty of kids we

Jodi from Love United

did not get profiles on as well. I am happy to say that the situation is not the same today!! We should do a follow up census. That will be a goal for 2015. But the fact is that we have worked to combat the situation where these kids had very little to no access to school and have come a long way! We

Recycling project

have to finish what we started. We need our own building, and we need to get accredited... which having our own building is one of the main requirements for that. We need to turn this school into something that will last. Having the building will make that much more of a reality. So I posted the

Supesta soccer team

brochure about the vacation raffle. Never has a post reached so many people as that post did on the FB page. So the interest is high! We just have to get out and sell! Can we get some friendly competition going over who can sell the most tickets? Also, back in the day, we used to sell mistletoe on

Teacher training

VT campus around Christmastime. I had to call around to several places to find someone who had it, but he sold a few branches and we cut it up into bundles tied with ribbon, which if I remember correctly, we sold for $5 each. So this is my late Nov./Dec. fundraising challenge for the purpose of fundraising for the

EM, Cherline, and campers

new school building: Sell vacation raffle tickets (drawing Dec. 18th) and sell bundles of mistletoe! At school, at church, at work, at a stand in a public place like the mall..be creative! And again, be bold and confident! This is a worthy cause! And it deserves to be known! Billions and billions of dollars are raised for medical research through which a cure might be possible and made

Camp game

accessible to a small percentage of the world's population. I am thankful for that too and am not saying those funds should not be raised. But I am just saying that the turnover is a lot more distant there than funds going directly to affecting a child's life HERE and

Faith, Hope, & Joy clinic

NOW. Many are concerned about global warming and overpopulation and other issues but the biggest problem I have seen in front of me for the past 8 years for the country of Haiti and the places like Puerto Plata where Haitian people seek refuge and the burden/responsibility that that places on this city is... the need for loving

Joanne ran a great camp!

and nurturing human development. I spent a large chunk of today crying after watching a video of a woman here beating a child. Maybe torturing is a better word. It was on the news here and I am sorry I ever saw it. We know cases like that happen in the US too but the truth is that Haitians in general have a lot of abuse instilled in them...it's a vicious cycle that can make things really hard and dysfunctional. How does that ever change?

TLC. TLC. TLC. Consistency. Proper examples. I want for them the love and nurturing environment that I grew up with..that we all did who grew up in the US and Canada. With our large classrooms, teachers who use proper punishments, creative games that make learning fun, science experiments, awesome libraries, and all of that! God bless it I want it for them too. Please don't drop out of the group, I'm not angry, just sharing with you the pressures that are on me here and the urgency that I feel. Go team go!